Christopher dimly remembers from his college days that the Lisbon earthquake (he knows it was in the eighteenth century but can’t date it more precisely) was the cause of much anguished philosophical questioning at the time, from Christians, deists and unbelievers alike, seeking to justify the ways of God to man.
Maybe we are all seeking for a neutral agency to wipe us out. An asteroid, a tsunami, a tidal wave.
Our longing for the tomb.
Preferably not a superior civilisation from the outer universes. We don’t want superiority to destroy us. Do we?
Christopher’s thought sequence here, as he eats his salty little side dish of wrinkled papas arrugadas, illustrates how much he is his mother’s son. This is how Fran thinks, and although Christopher isn’t aware that he is thinking about Fran, or thinking in Fran mode, he is, on one sedimentary ancient archaeological layer of his mind, laid down long ago, doing just that.
Fran, like Bennett, has always been interested in earthquakes.
Poppet (how can this sobriquet have stuck to his fierce sister?) has different views, but she is also interested in the apocalyptic. Poppet (her brother knocks back the dregs of El Grifo as he recalls this, and hopes Ivor will order another bottle) is full of some kind of unresolved anger, which she transfers to national and global issues. She has very long and inhuman perspectives. Ah, Poppet, little sister.
The local El Grifo wine (and watchful Ivor has by now ordered another bottle) has a little griffin on its wine label, but Bennett tells him that El Grifo has nothing to do with griffins or dragons; it really means ‘the tap’. The name is a pun. El Grifo, the tap.
Fran used to sing them to sleep.
Yes, here comes another green bottle of white wine.
Ten green bottles, hanging on the wall.
Christopher sometimes goes through these verses to himself as he lies awake in a hotel in some unfamiliar land in some unknown time zone. He doesn’t know that his mother walks herself up her punitive stairwell with them too.
I summon to the winding ancient stair . . .
Bennett emerges from his reverie, which had failed to make a connection with the submerged memory of the lost novel the title of which he has been trying to remember, and tells them instead about the great volcanic eruptions in the 1730s on Lanzarote that had created the beautiful arid icing-sugar-encrusted landscapes of Timanfaya. An edict had been issued by Philip V of Spain, invoking the death penalty on anyone who tried to flee the lava and leave the island of Lanzarote for Gran Canaria or Tenerife. Christopher wants to ask if the eruptions on Lanzarote were a predictor of the Lisbon earthquake (which must, surely, have been a little later?), but before he gets round to it Bennett has moved on to reminiscences of his boyhood longing to see a tidal wave. He knows the phrase ‘tidal wave’ is no longer much used, but Bennett prefers it to the new-fangled Japanese word ‘tsunami’ now in vogue. He describes how, on family holidays, he used to sit on the vast Norfolk beach where he first learned to swim, bored and restless with pre-pubertal angst, gazing at the flat far horizon of the North Sea, and imagining with longing a great swelling surge rearing up and sweeping inexorably towards his family encampment of deckchairs and wind-breaks and sandcastles and towels and cricket bats. It wasn’t a very likely prospect, in that flat non-volcanic terrain, but little Bennett hadn’t known that, at the time.
‘I used to like whale watching too,’ says Bennett, a little wistfully. ‘Off Vancouver Island. Do you remember those whales, Ivor? I keep hoping we’ll see dolphins here, but we don’t. You have to go to La Palma these days, to see dolphins. I don’t think I’ll ever get to La Palma again. It’s not very far, but those little Binter aeroplanes are very bumpy.’
Ivor feels that Bennett is getting too close to his King Charles’s Head – why the Canarian islanders had forgotten how to navigate. He risks drawing the conversation back towards Christopher’s last visit, suggesting that maybe tomorrow Christopher would like to go over with them to Fuerteventura on the short safe trip on the Fred Olsen ferry. They could pay a visit to their mutual friend Simon Aguilera. He too, says Bennett, lives in a remarkable house, worth the visit – perhaps they’d mentioned it when describing him to Sara as a potential source of local information? He’s got some great paintings, as Christopher probably knows. And in his retreat Aguilera has become much involved with the tragedy of the immigrantes, and has commissioned some artwork to be displayed in one of the ancient famine towers. Maybe Christopher would like to see the famine tower? It’s one of the oldest buildings on the island. It stored grain, long ago, during the emergencies.
Simon Aguilera had signed the Namarome petition and spoken about her on Spanish television, but she hadn’t wanted to receive him on her airport carpet, as she disapproved of his having killed his wife.
Bennett takes to the idea of a trip to Fuerteventura. He always enjoys an outing to the other island, and Simon is always pleased to see them.
Yes, that’s what they will do.
Simon’s Pilar will give them a small late lunch.
Driving back to La Suerte, Ivor recognises that he is disproportionately, almost sinisterly relieved by the accident of Christopher’s cheeringly complaisant company, and wonders if he can detain him any longer on this enchanted isle, or perhaps entice him back another day.
Bennett has spoken many times to Ivor of Plutarch’s theory that Calypso’s island of Ogygia, where she held the enchanted Odysseus spellbound for seven years, was really one of the Canaries. Ivor has no views on this piece of mythological topography, but he can’t see why not.
He’d like to keep Christopher, for company, for a while longer. Not seven years, but a few more days.
It is good to have a visitor who is nearer his own age than Bennett’s. Most of their friends on the island are in their seventies, some in their eighties, and most of those who loyally or sycophantically fly over to see them are of the same generation. Ivor’s life, apart from more than a few errant but discreet episodes, has been subsumed into Bennett’s. On the whole, he enjoys entertaining Bennett’s friends and showing them around: he got on well with their recent December guest, Owen England, a polite and pedantic old boy who was always very appreciative and a good sightseer and a good listener, easy to entertain. But Christopher Stubbs is a bit more dangerous than Owen, a bit more sparky, a bit more fun.
And new. New blood. Young blood.
The lights of the only high-rise building in Lanzarote are visible below them. He eyes them as he drives homewards. They are a beacon, but he’s not sure what they are beckoning him towards. It’s a very Spanish-speaking hotel, not many English-speaking foreigners patronise it. Ivor has tried it out, he’s had a drink there, he’s been up to look at the view from the top floor, but it’s not very interesting, it’s a bit featureless, and neither the sky-high bar nor the pavement bar provides promising terrain for Ivor. Ivor remembers it in its derelict epoch, its blackened graffiti-covered tower-block bomb-site epoch. Once, in those long-ago days, when he’d been sitting in a café on the palm tree promenade in Arrecife, waiting for the attorney’s office to open after its long siesta, he’d seen an elderly man trudging up the exposed stairwell in the heat of the afternoon, carrying several loaded plastic bags. He must have been camping out up there. Ivor was near enough to see his tired and broad-featured and weather-beaten face, to track his stooped and halting progress from floor to floor. Up and up he went, the old down-and-out, zigzagging his way up the cement flights.
An old Guanche, a throwback, one of the dispossessed. A figure from the past.
An indigenous figure, not an immigrante. Ivor doesn’t know how he knew this, but he did. The stoop, the stance, the broad shoulders, the undefeated air of possession and persistence.
Why was the old man climbing upwards? What home had he stubbornly made for himself up there amidst the ruins of the vandals? And why? Ivor never saw him again, although he looked out for him many times, and then the building was taken over, sold on, refurbished, in t
he days when the tourist industry was still expanding.
In their well-remunerated academic quarter, attached to the Committee on Social Thought in Chicago, in the late 1990s, Bennett and Ivor had stayed in a spacious apartment by the lake shore on the twentieth floor of a luxurious twin-towered block that had originally been built as public housing. Like the Lanzarote building, it had deteriorated. It had been bought up by a property company, and made over and turned into far from inexpensive rentals. The University of Chicago, four miles away, placed many of its short- and long-term lecturers and guests there. Saul Bellow had visited it many times, and Ivor now knows that Barack Obama used to swim in its palm-fringed basement pool, and wonders if he had ever unknowingly glimpsed that handsome man. The view of the ever-changing lake from their apartment was superb, the water blending and sometimes frisking from yellow to green to blue to pewter to cement to turquoise, but Ivor’s vertigo prevented him from fully appreciating this feature. When he was indoors, he could never sit facing the windows, though Bennett liked to place himself solidly in his vulgarly comfortable purple professorial armchair and stare out over the waters. He had earned that repose. He had worked hard, and sometimes against the grain, all his life.
Chicago had not been a friendly city for Ivor. It was too extreme, too tall, too sheer.
Twin towers. Twin towers, inviting, soliciting attack.
Ivor had paced the lakeside on the safe shore level many times, lonely and under-occupied, while Bennett brilliantly displayed himself like a cockatoo in his history seminars. Ivor had looked back from his promenades at the twin towers of the residential block. They rose so high that their brutal summits were sometimes obscured and wreathed in Olympian cloud. Between the towers, on the fifth floor, hung a garden, a hanging garden, not as magnificent as the little hanging garden of the Palazzo Ducale at Mantua which they had memorably visited one autumn during the festival. But charming in its way, with its dwarf poplars and its small lake and its ducks.
Such strange places they had inhabited, in their lives as vagrant scholars, and now here he was, driving Bennett and Christopher Stubbs home to what he hopes will be Bennett’s final dwelling place, to the safety of La Suerte.
Simon Aguilera’s house isn’t in itself vertiginous, but it does have an exposed spiral rocky look-out tower which Ivor will never more ascend. Once was enough.
He hopes Christopher will like the house. He’d texted Simon from the restaurant, and booked them all in for lunch. Simon said he was looking forward to seeing Christopher again. Ivor can well believe that.
Pilar is a brick. She likes visitors. She loves Bennett, who can make her laugh in Spanish.
Ivor and Simon have something of a conspiratorial relationship, based on a common interest in keeping Bennett calm and happy. Pilar supports them in this project.
Ivor loves Pilar’s name. Pilar. Pillar. To be called after a pillar. It’s too wonderful, to Ivor. She is a pillar of strength.
Christopher nods off in the back of the Peugeot, worn out with sea air, sea food, novelty, Canarian wine, grief, relief.
El Grifo.
As he sinks under, he thinks, briefly, of his mother Fran. She had texted him about something or other. His father? Sara? Poppet? Whatever? He can’t remember. Had she said she was going to Blackpool? She longs to set up Old Folks Help to Buy Communal Housing in Blackpool. Or was it in Morecombe? Or maybe the West Country? He can’t keep up with his mother’s ceaseless peregrinations.
His mother likes horrible places, and she has gone to live in one. It is most unsuitable. He’s been over there once, and once was enough, although he agrees the view is good. But why should a view mean so much to her? She’s a stubborn old woman. What is she trying to prove? Hamish and Highgate had been civilised and pleasant.
So, Hamish has died, and his dad Claude is still alive, and receiving plated meals from his ex-wife. He’s certainly worked out how to make himself comfortable.
Christopher had disliked his stepmother Jean, a very irritating old Sloane: he’s glad she’s out of the picture, and he suspects Claude is too.
Why couldn’t Fran live somewhere sensible, like Auntie Josephine? You wouldn’t have to worry about your mother if she lived in Athene Grange.
He doesn’t really call Josephine Drummond ‘auntie’, and never did, but these days he sometimes refers to her in this manner, by way of a generational joke. ‘And how’s Auntie Josephine?’ he will sometimes ask his mother. He has known Jo all his life, and she has known him from before he was born. He likes her, and when he was fourteen and she was thirty-five he used to fancy her. In the old days in Romley, when he used to play football on the marshes with Nat and Andrew.
Nat’s done all right for himself: he’s a sports commentator, he writes and broadcasts about cricket and travels to some nice places with the team. Nice work if you can get it. Andrew went more seriously into the civil service, but Christopher has no idea in which department.
Athene Grange is perfectly agreeable, in its own dull way. Jo had invited him and Poppet to her seventieth birthday party, though Poppet hadn’t accepted. There’d been some impressive cocktails. White Ladies, with a kick to them. Somebody there knew how to mix a drink. He’d caught up with Andrew and Nat, heard their updates, reminisced.
Ah Maman, you old fool, he thinks, not without affection, as he fades out on the back seat.
Josephine gazes at her ageing Tuesday morning class and wonders yet again if she was wise to take on such an ageing theme. In the nature of things, such classes are full of older people, so in choosing her subject she had, as they now say, ‘gone with the flow’. But it threatens to be lowering, this emphasis on age. She had thought it might be ennobling or comforting or bracing (and had deliberately attempted to exclude Larkin who is none of these), but she is not sure that she has the energy to keep all sixteen of her group suspended, up there on a higher plane. ‘Dans l’âme ayons un haut dessein’, as Verlaine had said somewhere or other, and she has tried to live up to this aspiration, but she can’t always maintain it. The class has discussed, through close attention to individual poems and poets, the subject of creativity in old age, the emblematic early deaths of several lyric poets, and the question of whether or not we can identify a phenomenon sometimes known as Late Style.
Perhaps it’s bound to be depressing. The last act is bloody, however charming the comedy that comes before, as some other French chap remarked, she thinks she recalls, of the art of biography.
Not that the French are very good at biography, are they? It’s an English language speciality.
Because some of her group are highly educated in other disciplines and over-qualified for the class, the discussions have ranged widely and into matters not covered by her prescribed course topics: they have wandered into Shakespeare’s late romances and the reasons for his retirement to Stratford-uponAvon, Rembrandt’s self-portraits and his portraits of his mother, Edward Said and Theodor W. Adorno on the anger and lament of Beethoven’s late work. Josephine encourages such meanderings, as they are part of what such classes are intended to inspire, but she has to rein in one or two of the more combative and exhibitionist of her students, in consideration for those who are here for simpler reasons. This morning they are supposed to be examining a 2011 poem by Robert Nye (b. 1939) called ‘Going On’, taken from what he says will be his last volume. She had believed it would appeal to all of them, and it does. They each have their sheet of paper with the poem upon it, and here it is:
One afternoon near Notre Dame
I watched a man negotiate
The crowded pavement, carrying
A pot of coffee in one hand
And in his other hand a cake.
I saw him passing through the throng
Like one protected, on his lips
A smile which said he made his way
Towards some little private room
Where he’d take his repast alone.
Now when I think I can’t go on
&nbs
p; What I remember is that man
With some small comforts in his hands
Passing along a crowded street
Towards a room all of his own.
The good nature and deep calm of this poem do not, however, prevent Sally Lyttelton from embarking on a lengthy and slightly aggressive digression about one of Nye’s historical novels that nobody else has read. They all listen patiently, while Josephine tries to plan a diversion that will lead them back to the work in hand, and on, as she had planned, to late Yeats and the tensions between the need for comfort and the spur of rage.
Sally Lyttelton is a formidable woman, who ought to know better than to be so domineering and time-consuming. She doesn’t need to domineer. Unlike some of the class, she has a perfectly satisfactory private life, and receives a good deal of attention from a wider public in her roles as a Professor Emeritus of Renaissance Studies, as a frequent broadcaster, as the wife of a former Vice Chancellor, and as the owner of one of the grander houses in the county. But these signifiers of status do not seem to have made her relaxed or easy-going. She has a sharp, staccato old-fashioned upper-class voice, with which she insists on acquiring an audience. She also has a strong contrarian spirit and, if you meekly try to agree with her, she will start contradicting both you and herself. Josephine can’t understand why she comes to this not-very-advanced class. Is it to show off? Is it to enjoy a sense of her own superiority to less intellectual and worse dressed elderly students like Ellen Musgrave, retired infant school teacher, and Mr Pennington, retired supermarket manager? Is it because she admires Josephine, which, oddly, she seems to do? (They had met at a lecture on brothels and the authorship of Pericles, Prince of Tyre in the University Library and struck up a lively and lasting, if shallow, acquaintance at the drinks reception that followed.) Or is it because she is genuinely interested in the subject of writing about age and in the ageing process?
She is a handsome woman, in a beaky kind of way, with a thin fine prominent nose and smart short layered silver-blonde hair, and today she is wearing what Josephine takes to be a very expensive suit (could the word Chanel perhaps apply to that neat sharp collarless effect?) in a fetching yellow and charcoal grey-checked tweed, and her shoes are a dark mustardy yellow. It’s quite an outfit. Maybe she is going on to a luncheon. Anyway, reflects Josephine, she’s the kind of woman who won’t take kindly to the insignificance of old age; she won’t want to lose what’s left of her good looks. Maybe she really does need to find some texts, some mantras, to see her through and up (or through and down) to the next level.
The Dark Flood Rises Page 12